Anti-Social Engineering the Hyper-Manipulated Self

Saturday, December 30, 2017

"In psychology, there’s an idea known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It refers to research by David Dunning and Justin Kruger that found the
least competent people often believe they are the most competent
because they “lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly
they’re doing.”

This is a quote from an excellent article by Vox. The article is a summary and commentary upon a very recent interview US President Donald Trump gave to the NY Times.
Please go read this article here

The Vox article describes a man who has lost at least some of his cognitive ability. The interviewer allows Trump, in his own words, to prove himself a man unfit for the office he holds. Donald Trump is not just a liar, but delusional, not just inarticulate but incoherent. He is willfully ignorant and authoritarian in a job where his power is absolute. If he was on the Apprentice, he wouldn't be able to deliver his lines and it wouldn't matter because his choices would be confined to the arena of celebrity. The fact that the President of the United States has lost his marbles (no offense to all other sufferers of cognitive dysfunction) is terrifying. Doing nothing about it is shameful.

Thus, this article. Do please at least make yourself aware of that which you are not aware.
Don't be like Donald Trump. Don't let America suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect.
You don't know what it is you don't know. Don't pretend to be an expert about that.
What you know compared to what you don't know could be expressed in the same ratio as the amount of time you are alive compared to the infinity before and after that.

It has come to my attention that Russian bots, and bots from other nations, including conservative American bots are trolling the internet, trying to pick fights.
This, apparently, is starting to happen here.
I, for one, will be talking to all bots in an attempt to see 1.) If it is really a bot, or just a stupid human and 2.) How smart these bots are.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

With White House staffers being either
fired or quitting, with CEOs of major American manufacturing turning
their backs on the Businessman in Chief and with Trump himself
repeatedly opening his mouth to spout his insane ideas, it seems that
there is now an effort to remove the President from office, in the
name of ability, if not reputation.

However, what everyone is forgetting
about is that this won't necessarily fix the problem. Trump is a
narcissistic bigot, apparently a liar and unlikable, but he's also a
mouthpiece. Because of his volume, at least with Trump you know what
you get. Once the blowhard is exorcised, the White House will place
Pence POTUS and the stream of ludicrous information will stop.
However this doesn't mean that the insanity will stop. Trump and his
gaggle of gargoyles have "drained the swamp" as they set
out to, replacing every chicken in the hen house with a fox. Getting
rid of the King Fox, does not rid us of every other fox, it just
boards up the windows, locks the door and creates an information
vacuum. Evil nutjobs will still be running the country, they'll just
be doing it in secret.

So let's take a look at the Vice
President. Michael Pence is an extreme right wing, Christian
conservative. He wasn't always, he was a democratic Catholic until
the Reagan years, when he was born again, literally, to the dismay of
his family. It has been said that "Pence doesn't just wear his
religion on his sleeve, he's wearing the whole Jesus jersey." So
with ancient legends steering his moral compass, he believes things
like: abortion is murder, gays can be cured, immigrants had better
beware and refugees had better turn around, healthcare is Socialism,
global warming is a myth, drugs, sex and gambling are "bad,"
ignorance is better than knowledge, sheep are better than wolves,
etc. He carries with him the same deck of cards as Trump and his
cronies, he's playing the same game, only Pence has a much more
developed poker face.

If he replaces Donald Trump as
President, the song will remain the same, we just won't get to hear
it anymore. This is scarier than the evil you know.

Friday, July 7, 2017

I'm in a blackout. I have electricity,
I'm fine. Fridge is cold, I even have the air conditioning on, it's
July 5, 2017 3:45 pm pacific time, Planet Earth. It's hot, 34 degrees
Celsius. (Figure it out, America.) I'm in a blackout because I have
no internet. A few years ago, count them on one hand, being without
the internet would have been a minor inconvenience, now it's a
fucking catastrophe.

I can't access my cloud, Alexa and My
Google have become useless. There goes all my entertainment,
information access, past, present and future. I can't invoice for my
writing, I can't submit this essay. I can't trade the markets. (Yes,
I trade, two hours a day every morning. No I'm not rich. I have no
secret trick to sell you. I write, trade and work a day job.) Oh, I
can't access the emails I require to do that day job, so no day job
either.

Except, that's not really true because
I can get email, the internet and therefore access to everything with
my cell phone. But not without using up precious, expensive data. My
wife and I eek out our meagre mobile cyber experience with only two
gigs of data shared between us, per month. This is enough, with our
Pixels plugged into Mother Google, for them to still constantly be
surprising us. "So," asks the phone, "what did you
think of that Hamburger you just ate?"

Granted, I have invited all this into
my life. I am a technophile of sorts. I don't go to extremes, I'm not
rich by Western standards, so I don't have everything that's out
there. But I speak to machines who talk back to me everyday. I go to
McDonalds, eat that hamburger and allow Google to know exactly where
I am, what I am doing. Wifi, internet, satellites, GPS, these things,
at least plus me plus phone equals my datasphere.

Even ordering that hamburger involves
interacting with a machine now, but don't worry because my phones
also gonna say, (you have to imagine my phone with a Californian
accent,) "Hey Dumbass, you only took 987 steps today, you better
get walking, cuz you just ate, like a thousand calories." I
don't mind, but maybe you do? Maybe you think it's intrusive. You can
turn it off, as I originally had. "I don't need Google
organizing all my shit for me!" This if fine, but I found, as
you may too, that if you want to use certain features, it's a lot
easier to just turn them all on.

Your permissions don't much matter,
because it's not going to be very long before such technologies, or
rather the use of such technologies becomes obligatory. The world of
the future, provided things proceed unhindered by needless damages,
will be one of increased time getting up close and personal with
technology. This does not bother me. Put me in a cyborg, as soon as
they're ready. Plug me into the Matrix, I'll be a head in a jar,
whatever. (Maybe not the Beta versions.) My wife, not so much. She's
afeared that the non-flesh is unnatural, perhaps faulty. Maybe she's
right, certainly at first...Perhaps you side one way or the other.

This too, isn't going to matter in the
end. That future, always ahead of us, a dream until we make it a
reality, will continue to be obligated to grow, working toward
increased time spent becoming technology. I for one will welcome our
new Robot paradigm, it is the opportunity for the continued potential
of consciousness, namely mine, but also on a grander scale. Even if I
didn't, we're all going to turn around and cars will be driving us,
we'll all blink and be out of a manufacturing job, we'll all take a
breath to discover there's no longer a need.

It's just a question of time. I think
it more likely that Artificial Intelligence will be a transferred
person before a created person. Once we can do that, put a person, a
real consciousness inside a machine, any machine can be anybody,
nobody, everybody. We can copy, paste, edit. All bets are off.

Monday, May 22, 2017

In 1987, when I was fifteen, my friends and
I took the train from Salmon Arm to Vancouver to see U2 in concert at
BC Place.

This last weekend my friends and I did it again, except we
drove ourselves. That wasn't the only difference in the experience.

In 1987 we had to get our tickets the
old fashioned way, standing in line at the ticket kiosk at the
Village Green Mall. Some, more adventurous types had even camped out,
we didn't but we were still able to get tickets, because ticket resellers
didn't exist yet except in the form of scalpers, who had to stand in
line as well. Today, companies like Stub Hub buy up tickets online so
they can resell them to you at ridiculous markup. Often, modern
would-be concert goers can't get a tickets. Luckily, my friend is a
big U2 fan and was able to get a bunch of great tickets via his U2
fan club membership.

In 1987 we were seated way up on the
second tier, but every time the lights went down, before the Bodeans,
before Los Lobos and finally before U2, waves of hundreds, if not
thousands of people jumped over walls and barricades to get onto the
floor. My friends and I were part of those waves. In the process I
cut my hand on a barricade, I didn't even notice until someone
pointed out the blood. A sweaty teen, freshly freed from the front of
the crowd, handed me a dirty tissue to stop the blood. "Don't go
up there. It's crazy," he said. I still can see the scar on my
hand, I call it my U2 scar. My friends and I, after being separated
in the waves, were reunited on the floor (somehow) and we enjoyed U2
together. Aside from the great show, which was ultimately captured in
the concert film Rattle & Hum, we also shared some
memorable events: the men in suits smoking marijuana, (hadn't seen
that before,) security wrenching teenager's arms out of sockets in an
effort to remove them from the premises, the crowd part because a
naked man was swirling around dancing. (Security was less willing to
grab him.) The performance itself was made of iconic gestures and
sounds that would come to define U2.

Last weekend, we had floor tickets, so
no blood was let. Thank goodness, I'm too old now. So was everyone
else. Where BC Place was filled with teenagers in 1987, it was now
filled with those same teenagers, middle aged. I didn't see security
hurt anyone, only help people in distress. No naked people swirling,
just polite, happy Canadians sharing an amazing experience with some
professional entertainers. U2, although obviously older and less
energetic was still able to captivate. Bono can win anyone over with
a wave of his hand. The Edge still looked and played the same. Adam
Clayton still just stood there doing the funky chicken with an
ambiguous grin on his face and Larry, well Larry never changes.

To be honest, I didn't want to go when
I first heard that U2 was doing a thirty year anniversary tour of the
Joshua Tree. I thought, "How is that going to be anything but
worse than it was originally?" I was particularly worried about
Bono's voice. He does a lot of yelling and he gets tired. I'm really
glad that I did go, because Bono was fine, everything was impressive
and the concert was more than just fun, it was an experience. Music
is something that can well up inside you and explode out, both as
creator and creation. It's as close to spiritual as I've ever come, I
think. Time, technology and prevailing social attitudes have put us
all in a situation that is better than it was in the past (as hard as
that is to believe.) Whenever you collect over fifty thousand people
in one space and have them emote, be happy we are Canadian, be proud
of our ability to get along swimmingly, celebrate our ability to do
amazing things together, even if it is just to be part of an
audience. Thank you U2 and thank you to my friend Ryan for insisting we
go.

The world is a different place because
all things change, even the things that we call unchanging. This
continued change will go on unabated. It might seem like the world in
2017 is rife with ignorant and dangerous people, full of fear and/or
hate. This, I suppose is true, but there has been and there likely
will continue to be these people, always. It's not anything newer,
it's just louder. Not because they are
louder, (although this is usually the case,) but because we
are better listeners. Furthermore, it doesn't change the fact that there are also decent, reasonable
people, full of love and joy, there always has been, also always will
be. I'm not saying everything is sunshine and lollipops, I'm saying
we are better off than we
were thirty years ago, because we are
thirty years smarter than we were. They haven't
changed at all. Kudos to us for becoming enlightened, shame on us for
not sharing our enlightenment with the reluctant.

At one point, near
the beginning of U2's set, Bono was talking to the audience, having
us sing to Pride in the name of love, explaining:
"Sing loud so others may hear you, where others close their
doors yours remain open." It's a simple statement, expressing a
broad liberal stance on the treatment of other humans being, or
sometimes not being. It suggests we have a duty to do something in
the service of one another rather than in punishment of one another.
It's not lost on a U2 audience, be it here or in America, or anywhere
else. But then again, we are
not the problem, are we?

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About the site

I can happily blather on and on about the constituents of paradigm, anti-social engineering the hyper-manipulated self, authenticity, the rampant ineptitude of modernity, the self, the history of the self, the domain of morality or nearly any other facet of conscious actualization, up to and including simpler aspects of neurobiology.
In fact, I do...
Anti-Social Engineering
the Hyper-Manipulated Self
by Brian C. Taylor

Everything is breaking down around us
and it's our fault.
You & I are only partially culpable.
For our actions work
only from within an exacting system.
The system itself is flawed,
which is scary enough,
particularly when one considers
that nearly our entire lives
are married to it and reliant upon it.
The system will not change itself
and the power does not want it changed.
We must change the system
by changing ourselves.
We must deprogram.

This is the 21st century Enlightenment.

This is Anti-Social Engineering
the Hyper-Manipulated Self,
ISBN: 978-0-557-99909-5
http://stores.lulu.com/postpaper

Chasing philosophers through the ages,
following our own ideas about the self,
to dismantle both himself and modernity,
the author brings in this tiny work,
with candour, wisdom and depth,
a dismantling of thought,
a critique of the species,
a pathway to virtue.

"We are not talking about God here,
nor even the grand scheme of society,
we wonder about ourselves.
By realizing when someone or something asks us to believe in it,
in its intention,
to create some reality out of an idea,
we can begin to wonder about the value of following the rule."

"If modernity is the cause of complexity
and systemic complexity is the cause of the rampant ineptitude that keeps rearing its ugly head,
and we,
in our infinite confusion,
attempt only to counter this problem by adding further complexity,
are we not just denying
there is even a problem?"

"During the Enlightenment,people woke up fromtheir conscious servitude.In this new Enlightenmentwe awake from ourunconscious servitude."

Watch the Trailer for the book

About the Author

Brian C. Taylor is a writer of philosophy and a social critic.

Brian Taylor's social commentary attempts to use logic and reason to examine his acute humanity, with virtue as his goal.

In this objective honesty, no facet of existence, no act nor thought, can be overlooked. All rabbits must be chased down all holes. Pulling no punches, holding little sacred, the author tackles even the most controversial topics of the day: politics, society, religion, war, the economy, nationalism, culture, conspiracy, corporatism, the future, the individual, himself and you.

Brian Taylor's creative non-fiction work is particularly concerned with the hyper-manipulation of modernity toward the apparent goal of overall systemic failure. He seeks the best possible choosing in a world where his choices are made for him, and poorly. His Anti-Social Engineering provides a way to combat the forces that work against our abilities and freedoms as individuals. Readers will find his writing easy to understand, entertaining as it informs and liberating in its purpose.

He has been a regular contributor to science20.com, where his essays have been read over 100,000 times. His essays are read all over the world in multiple languages. His books sell everywhere in the world.

Below you can see the Blog Archive, where you will find various essays on various topics. If the essay is numbered, it is meant to be read in order.

Take your time, bookmark the page and come back.There is a lot to absorb and it perpetually grows.